Justin Thomas searching for level of play that keyed his 2022 PGA Championship victory

At the end of a long, aggravating day, Justin Thomas was in quite a mood when the third round of the 2022 PGA Championship was complete.

He shot a 4-over-par 74 at Southern Hills and the way Mito Periera was playing, it certainly seemed like Thomas’ chances of winning the golf tournament were slim because he would be starting the final round seven shots in arrears.

Bones MacKay, who spent most of his career caddying for Phil Mickelson, retired to become a TV analyst, and then returned to the Tour to carry Thomas’ bag in 2021, had been in this spot so many times before with Mickelson.

He knew he needed to get Thomas back in the proper frame of mind, so even though it was cold in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Thomas was irritated, Mackay encouraged him to go to the practice range and try to hit some quality shots. If nothing else, that would prove to Thomas that his swing was close and there wasn’t anything fatally wrong.

“The gist of it was simply that there is nothing out here that you need to fix,” Mackay told Golf Digest. “The round could easily have been 69 or 70, but he shot 74. That was the number on the card, but there was nothing to fix. And he had a great range session to wrap up the day.”

Thomas acknowledged that fact Monday afternoon following his first practice round at Oak Hill Country Club.

“I think the biggest thing for me was honestly just getting it out of my system Saturday before I left the golf course, and I think that was something Bones did a great job with,” Thomas said. “It was cold that Saturday, it was late in the day. I wasn’t necessarily going to go have an unbelievable practice session just with the conditions and weather and everything. I needed to be leaving on a lot more positive note and almost just go down there and just vent and kind of get it out of me.”

It worked because Thomas returned Sunday and shot 3-under 67 which got him into a playoff with Will Zalatoris - only after Pereira blew the tournament by double-bogeying the 18th hole which allowed Thomas and Zalatoris to catapult ahead of him.

In the three-hole playoff, Thomas made two birdies and that was enough for his second PGA Championship victory, the first coming at Quail Hollow in Charlotte in 2017 when he birdied five holes in an 11-hole stretch to win by two shots.

If he’s going to win a third PGA this week, Thomas has to play the way he did two weekends ago at Quail Hollow which, when it isn’t hosting majors, is the annual home of the Wells Fargo Championship.

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Thomas hasn’t won since his victory at Southern Hills and has only four top 10 finishes in the 19 events he has teed it up. But despite a tie for 14th on a course he knows well and has succeeded on, he felt like things were starting to click. Now the trick will be to carry that forward when he begins his PGA defense Thursday.

“I’ve preached this to myself, I’m sure I’ve said it to y’all or I’ve said it to younger guys that ask, but how you learn is failure and negatives, and I feel like I’ve had a great opportunity for a lot of learning the past, whatever, six months, couple months, this year,” he said. “I said it in Charlotte a little bit, I’m starting to see a little bit of a light at the end of the tunnel.”

Before that, Thomas admitted there were weeks in the past year when he pretty much knew he wasn’t going to win. For a PGA Tour star who has 15 career victories which ranks him fifth among active Tour players behind only Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson and Rory McIlroy, that’s an unusual feeling.

“It sucks, it’s terrible,” he said. “I mean, how I described it for a couple months is I’ve never felt so far and so close at the same time. That’s a very hard thing to explain, and it’s also a very hard way to try to compete and win a golf tournament.

“But that’s how you get out of it, just playing your way out of it and hitting the shots when you want to and making those putts when you need to. Then your confidence builds back up, and next thing you know, you don’t even remember what you were thinking in those times.”

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Thomas was still two years away from getting his PGA Tour card the last time the PGA Championship was at Oak Hill in 2013 so Monday was his first round on the East Course and, surprise, surprise, he said it was going to present quite a challenge.

“Just what I’d heard about the course is that it’s a tough golf course,” he said. “I love the way the courses look up here, just the definition of the fairway to the rough and the cutting of the bunkers, and I love the kind of sharp edges on the greens.

“This place reminds me a little bit of a Winged Foot; not the severity of the greens. They’re not like Winged Foot, nothing is. But just the designs of them and some of the pin locations and how the fairways kind of canter against the slopes or whatever you want to call it. It’s a really good golf course.”

Sal Maiorana can be reached at maiorana@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @salmaiorana.To subscribe to Sal's newsletter, Bills Blast, which will come out every Friday during the offseason, please follow this link: https://profile.democratandchronicle.com/newsletters/bills-blast

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Justin Thomas tries to regain form to defend PGA Championship title